From a lovely zine I read in Asheville NC in June 2023.

1. NO FUTURE /dear freedom by _by.ALEXANDER
   

   I typically don’t pay attention to the lyrics but these appear to have been written by an edgy 19-year old. I could watch its music video forever:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdwsScBd9oA

2. On The Ground by oskar med k
   
3. snowfall by Øneheart x reidenshi
   
4. Muddat by Ali Sethi + Nicholas Jaar
   

1. Modern.css is a list of CSS code snippets that bring your game firmly into the 2020s
   

   Here’s a cheatsheet for common things. Amazing stuff you can do these days with just CSS.

A graduate student used the word “voluntold” in conversation. I’d never heard of it and love it.

I took these twenty years ago on Christmas Day 2005 en route to Minneapolis. I had just purchased my first digital camera (a Sony DSC-f717) two weeks ago and would play with it all day (manual focus in this case).

A most overwhelmingly beautiful mural.

Old New Yorkers have told me that these are the tallest they’ve seen in a while. There’s piles in the Midwest too but they’re spread out, don’t impede foot traffic, and don’t lead to the visual comedy of watching people (or noting oneself) summiting them. When not covered with punctured garbage bags, they can be very pretty to look at.

Grad School #

I concluded a unstressful, fantastic first term back in school. I am typing this a week into my second which, from the looks of it, promises to make up for the chill of the first.

Still remain unsure of where exactly where this detour is going but am really happy I’m learning a lot of stuff immersed in domains I’ve always loved. What they do here and what you can do here is amazing, exciting, and pretty overwhelming. And by “here” I suppose I mean this crazy interlocked dynamo that’s the department + the university + NYC. I am very lucky to be drinking from this firehose.

I am hoping to figure out what I’d specifically like to work on this term. It’ll be fine even if I don’t.

Home ♥️ #

It was really lovely to go back home for break and see my family, especially my diva husky who was reasonably happy to have me back (even if for a bit). Was not ready to leave and pushed my return date twice. I read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies and shows, redid my wife’s website, worked on a small personal project I’ve wanted to start since 2018. I also played a lot with Claude Code and really felt the epochal shift in what it means to be a programmer post 2025.

NYC #

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the general temperament of an irascible, retired Rabbi who’s just kinda had it you know? I thought I’d feel the same after I moved from my Midwest hinterland, few people, wide open spaces, no traffic problems, and mostly straight lines from source to target, almost disturbing level of quiet, to the Giant Beehive that is the Greatest City in the World. Thought I’d have a tough time adjusting.

Nope. I am still surpised by how much I’m just fine with living here. Still have a lot to learn about getting around and planning trips and appreciating the sheer size and density but it’s all so lovely and invigorating. People are mostly kind, helpful, and very direct. They don’t have time to be detained for (interminable per tradition) Midwestern chitchat. I kinda love this. You help, you keep walking. 🗽

1. Marimo is a giant improvement over Jupyter Notebooks
   

   Tons of features but, to me, the coolest things are: easy UI controls, git-friendliness, and reactivity.

2. A sample of Claude Code prompts someone used to create a fun Rust CLI app
   

   Messed with Claude Code over Christmas break and, while quite impressed, was unsure of how people used it to create and manage non-trivial projects.

   My initial thoughts: (a) Be explicit and (b) Check the work.

3. Maccy is a Clipboard Manager for macOS
   

   And the answer to my prayers. Activate a ‘multi-clipboard’ with a very simple and memorable ⌘Shiftc

   brew install maccy but please get it via Gumroad or the App Store.

4. MassGrave.dev provides plain and simple download links for Windows and Office
   

   Windows 11 is an ad platform and AI shit-showcase masquerading as a serious operating system that serious people are supposed to use to get serious things done. Bookmarking this in case I have to use this infernal piece of software.

   It’s all too sad really. I’ve used it since Windows 3.1 and still think Windows 7 was a fantastic OS (used it exclusively for gaming). Looks like I might be good with the Windows 10 Enterprise IOT LTSC version, at least until 2032.

5. How to Build an Agent
   

   Cached.

6. Flickity is a Carousel/Slider Library
   

My wife’s an O’Connor stan and called it “one of the greats” when I told her I was going to read it. I also told her I lost my shit when I opened a Google Document someone had posted with the story and found an “AI Summary” panel next to the text. A killer feature for VC champions who cannot scrape together enough time and attention for fifteen letter-sized pages (12pt, single-spaced, 1.5 inch margins) of a short story, what with being laden with the solemn and excruciating burden of buoying the economy on a cushion of mostly hot farts.

My resting state is composed almost entirely of pathos and general discomfiture.

This is my first FOC story. I enjoyed it so much I read it twice. Here’s the full text. Sans summary for you’ve always been able to do that in your fucking head.

Spoilers. #

She’s really funny. Some examples: Just everything leading up to the line “The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.” Mr. Teagarden’s Coca-Cola fortune. “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” And my absolute favorite: a shellshocked, orange-nosed cat hanging off its owners neck “like a caterpillar”. Love it.

And then it all goes dark. I wouldn’t even call this sudden; you barely notice where you are when it changes. ‘Slowly, then suddenly.’ Complete, masterful control over cadence. The Wikipedia page has a lot of quotes by O’Connor herself about what it all means at the end. She calls herself “a Catholic writer” and there’s all this stuff about her “anagogical vision”² and extending Christian Grace, even when your life is imperiled and even in your dying moments, and allowing God to flow through it all.

Two things that kept coming to mind were (1) this is about Satan and (2) this is about the simplicity, not banality, of Evil. And like the Misfit, some people know they’re being evil but are too far along and too embarrassed to concede their errors and mend their ways. The Grandma appeals to the Misfit’s good provenance and original nature. It doesn’t matter. It’s just how it is for him now. This is who he is, with “no real pleasure” in continuing to be so.

My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!’"

Overall, and speaking as someone who’s written JavaScript for a living, I’d say Ms. O’Connor shows good, intriguing promise as a writer. Tip-top stuff. I look forward to reading more of her work and soon.

Here’s a reading by Hannah Joyner.

This is also a very necessarily sad subject. There is so much in the movie that gave us a Rusty Cohle “Time is a Flat Circle” vibes. There isn’t much we felt and discussed that’s new under the sun. We need to remember history and speak the Truth (and to power) no matter how difficult it is. My attorney buddy told me that Burt Lancaster’s¹ character, Dr. Ernst Janning - Reich Minister of Justice - was one of his favorite characters. His climactic monologue will make you wonder why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQicYslxGgE

You can and should watch the movie for free.

I went back to the American Museum of Natural History after about 8 years. I plan on going back as frequently as I can (it’s free with my student ID!) This might have been the best thing I saw and learned on my last trip.

Even ichthyologists cannot always identify a fish species just by looking at it from the outside. So they use a technique that makes flesh transparent, which lets them see the fish’s internal anatomy without cutting it open.

Clearing and staining can help scientists distinguish similar species, determine evolutionary relationships-and even see whether a male seahorse is carrying eggs! Before CT scans were available, clearing and staining was the best way to see inside an intact specimen, and the process is still widely used today.

Matthew Barney suspended himself in this space to draw those squiggles that feature his Cremaster Cycle logo (he calls them “Field Emblems”). Not a good shot since you can’t tell the sizes of things but this is a pretty large and cavernous space.

The Cremaster films are some of the weirdest things I’ve seen (in a mostly good way).

by Sol DeWitt. ‘Only’ wood and paint but you can stare at this thing forever.

By Martin Puryear. Red cedar, pine, black locust, ash, and rattan.

I photographed these at a 2015 exhibit in Chicago and saved them to perhaps use as funky webpage backgrounds. I still remember them being so beautiful and absolutely hypnotic in person. They were designed in Austria, Paris, Munich, and Russia.

I am very partial to the benisons of technology and civilization and hence hate camping.

But I did love glamping with the fine folk at Under Canvas in Valle, AZ.

I channeled a lot of Tom Haverford.

Statue of a Seated Woman from 101 CE–200 CE. “Here the figure’s head and arms, now missing, were made separately and attached by means of dowels, the holes for which are visible.”

This was a kind of template (one of a few) for noblewomen, goddesses, and other exalted female figures.

As told by Dr. Mihaly Mezei, Professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, at a seminar at my department.

It reminded me of an old joke […] Khruschev and Bulganin, at that time when there was a Soviet Union, were visiting the Queen of England. And so Khruschev notices that Bulganin puts a silver spoon in his pocket during the dinner.

So Khruschev said, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, I want to show you a magic trick. Here is a silver spoon. I put it in my pocket. Bulganin, take it out!

I really need to read this book and soon.

A most nonsensical thing I heard about mobiles from one of the most annoying and odious characters in television:

From the Sui (581-618 CE) and Tang (618-907 CE) Dynasties.

TL;DR: Get this.

A reasonable and normal human being would prepare to clean their laptop’s keyboard by getting together a cleaning cloth (e.g. microfiber) and solution (e.g. isopropyl alcohol). They would then power down their laptop and clean their keyboard (and maybe trackpad and screen) before pushing the power button on again.

That last part would not get you promoted at Apple. When your MacBook is shut down, any key is the power key. Because fuck you and your reasonable expectations.

The official guidance is to employ a can of compressed air. Make sure it’s really compressed so it gets rid of both debris and grease.

You can also issue terminal incantations, and hold down several keys and the power button in the shut down state (which is not guaranteed to work on newer laptops)¹.

In your (unreasonable) frustration, you can make a lovely, free, & helpful little utility that addresses this problem and attempt to publish it to the App Store. It will be rejected as being “not useful” because Apple, run by visionaries who care deeply about design, knows better and would really love it if you shut the fuck up.

A play on Mr. Lovenstein’s original by Dorsa Amir.

1. Private Caller by Saint Pepsi
   

   Loved zoning out to this, watched it twice. We peaked in the 90s (early 2000s weren’t bad either).

2. Dean Town by Vulfpeck
   

1. CloudHiker is a lovely replacement for ye olde StumbleUpon
   

Reminded me of the fluid and flowy stuctures built by the Engineers in the Prometheus movies. Was headed home from after putting away many pounds of food at my aunt’s.

Also:

Like Charles Bukowski said: “People think I’m down on 5th and Main at the Blarneystone throwin’ back shooters and smokin’ a cigar, but I’m on the top floor of the health club with a towel in my lap, watchin’ Johnny Carson.”

The Ashes, one of Cricket’s most hallowed tournaments held every two years between archrivals Australia and England since 1882, proved to be yet another theater of the ongoing embarrassment of English Cricket and its obdurate affection for a strange and ineffective philosophy, many notable individual heroics aside. I sincerely take no joy at all in this: everyone enjoys a nice and tense set of games between evenly matched opponents in any sport.

No pundit so of course here’s a trenchant analysis. Evident home advantage aside, Australia just played meat-n-potatoes Test Cricket: Bowlers suffocated with near-perfect line and length. Batsmen didn’t indulge in outlandish heroics (“Vibe Cricket”). And critically, every person responsible for catching a ball (you know, to get the other team out) made sure to wash their hands of any butter from breakfast. And there was, at the minimum, a ‘concept of a plan’. That’s all. Small things, great attention, done to perfection.

England managed to talk a big talk and do little else. All the dropped catches aside, I will not forget how their spearhead fast bowler, a very talented fella, got mouthy with and punished by the greatest Test batsman in a generation, all while dressed like a recently promoted minor henchman in a Guy Ritchie movie: “Bowl fast when there’s nothing going on Champion.” I cannot think of a more symbolic summary of both the series and the state of English Cricket than the minute and thirty seconds of that video.

Since 2013 England has won 10 and drew 6 of 38 Test matches against Australia.

• Shringara (Love and Beauty)
• Hasya (The Comic)
• Veera (The Heroic)
• Shanta (Tranquility)
• Raudra (Anger)
• Karuna (Compassion)
• Bhībhatsa (Revulsion)
• Bhayānaka (Fear)
• Adbhuta (Wonder)

My part of the internet is abuzz with the departure of an Apple Exec named Alan Dye who just may be responsible for all the dogshit UI/UX decisions at the company over the last decade or so that heavily favored looks over functionality to a lot of unheeded frustration and dismay. John Gruber offers a fascinating account of his seemingly ill-deserved accession and shittiness as an design leader. Here’s a zinger from the footnotes:

I have good reason to believe that Ive, in private, would be the first person to admit that [he made a mistake promoting Dye]. A fan of Liquid Glass Jony Ive is not. I believe he sees Dye as a graphic designer, not a user interface designer — and not a good graphic designer at that. I don’t think Alan Dye could get a job as a barista at LoveFrom [Ive’s design shop].

Oof. Here are two other posts on the drama.

The absolute nuke is an encore by designer Juan Buis of “Liquid Ass” fame.

Now I’m told it gets better:

Really hoping I smile at my nerdrage over “bullshit visions borne of arrogance, fart-sniffing, and desperation” a year or two from now.

It’s always The Hitchhiker’s Guide. I don’t think this man has read the book or the series in its entirety. If he has, I suppose it must be “being on the spectrum” that would explain his abject inability to see that Adams is ridiculing (and would mercilessly ridicule) people exactly like him.

Oates appears to have stirred him into critiquing film (source). Can’t wait for him to be the most trenchant presence here as well.

1. YEDA YUNG (Instrumental) by YUNG DSA
   
2. Charlie Mulvihills / The Conspiracy by Joanie Madden
   

   One of those perfect things to wake up and sip hot tea to on a winter weekend.

3. Islandman by Khepre
   
4. Djinn/Djiin by Sahale
   

   Heard this at some bar in San Francisco. Reminded me of the Fremen from Dune (esp that cover art).

5. Surf Rider by Il Est Vilane
   
6. Patterns by Ahmad Jamal Trio
   
7. Belisha Beacon by Funki Porcini
   

   Heard this off a young person’s boombox on the subway.

8. Nova by Amon Tobin
   
9. Privateering by Mark Knopfler
   
10. Trust Fades by Nine Inch Nails
    
11. Etre Une Femme by Anggun
    

1. Alegreya is a lovely serif typeface
   
2. "The worst programming language of all time" is one of the best overviews of C++
   
3. Repomix will pack "your entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file"
   

   And LLMLingua (Microsoft) will compress things for context windows.

4. A Set of Windows Themes for Linux
   

   I was tickled to try out the Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows 7 ones. Simpler, purer times.

5. A 10-Week Golang Onboarding Doc
   

   Covers testing/mocking, databases, Redis, performance. For engineers at Stream. Cached.

6. Dropover enhances drag-and-drop with a simple mouse shake gesture
   

   Obsessive organizer of things and see myself using this daily.

7. Ice is a menu bar manager and an alternative to Bartender
   

I go to a pizzeria at around 2:00AM.

“Hey man can I get a slice?”
“No man only burger.”

Turns around, gets back to putting trays away.

Think before you speak, don’t waste peoples’ time, this most certainly ain’t Kansas.

I ♥️ NY 🍕

(Two large slices, cheese and pepperoni.)

And why it was very silly of me to think of them as mere adornments:

The larger fur liner creates a larger boundary layer [a thin layer of air created by molecules bumping into each other].

(Cached: fur, no fur)

I’ve never used an LUT, which stands for “Look Up Table”, and thought I’d give this one a try. The work is Fall by Allison Saar (2011). I cannot wait to take a picture of it when it snows.

Thank you, Almighty Algorithm, for this absolutely hypnotic piece of music, choreography, and camerawork.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wducEKHKRvg

More videos by the conservatory. Song by Il Est Vilaine, choreography by Martha Nichols, and camerawork by Devin Jamieson.

And here’s the Dancer in the Blue Shorts.

At the Leica store in the Meatpacking District. Love me a good cutaway.

Was looking for an alternative to my trusty “10 Hours of IceBreaker Idling in the Arctic” and found this.

over the last couple of years i’ve been making really really really quiet music to listen to when i do yoga or sleep or meditate or panic. i ended up with 4 hours of music and have decided to give it away.

it’s really quiet: no drums, no vocals, just very slow calm pretty chords and sounds and things for sleeping and yoga and etc. and feel free to share it or give it away or whatever, it’s not protected or anything, or at least it shouldn’t be.

thanks,
moby

via OpenCulture

Advice from an eminent scientist I worked for and looked up to (and still do) at my very first job after college.

Just showing up – on time, rested, clean, appropriately dressed, and well fed – is half the battle (50%).

Having enthusiasm and maintaining a patient and positive attitude despite adversity is half of the remaining half (75%).

Knowing your likes and dislikes (and your strengths and weaknesses) accurately enough that you can formulate some clear life goals that are well aligned with who you really are is half of the remaining half (87.5%).

Using the clear image of these goals to guide your decisions in such a way that you spend most of your time doing things that you enjoy and are good at is half of the remaining half (93.75%).

Surrounding yourself with people who are honest, optimistic, and who like you for who you are, is half of the remaining half (96.875%). Being honest with yourself and others – and obeying the ethic of reciprocity in everything you do – is half of the remaining half (98.4375%).

If you do all of these things most of the time, it has been my experience that good fortune can be counted on to fill in any gaps that occur and to carry you well beyond your original dreams and goals.

I read “iPhone Pocket” and got very excited about the prospect of an updated iPhone Mini (the best phone I’ve used). But lo, a $230 mankini for your fucking phone from a very unserious group of people at Apple:

“Courage” indeed.

Made me think of how insufferable I must have been in my early 20s, when New Atheism was in vogue, and I had killer arguments against faith and religion that were as necessary and delicate and nuanced as a loud fart in a cathedral. Not religious in the least but that me would’ve really loved Grant’s ramblings in this movie.

Thing is, I don’t think the writers would have landed the plane even if they’d consulted an actual academic or theologian and didn’t just rely on a 3-hour YouTube speedrun of the Best of Hitchens and Dawkins.

You can think whatever you’d like about Mormon missionaries and their obligations but it can be dangerous work. I remember two fellas visiting me in 2011. I gave them some water and we chatted. They were much younger than me but had a lot of stories to tell.

I get around 8-10 calls from 1-8xx numbers every single day, most of them pertaining to financial scams (I get as many text messages as well). A few leave voicemail and the GIF at the end of this note shows about two weeks’ worth. I’ve taken to silencing unknown numbers on my iPhone. The Do Not Call Registry is on a quick little break right now.

Actually doing something about a problem everyone agrees is awful would be antithetical to Free Market principles, a blot on the idea of Freedom itself, and would precipitate the demise of our thriving republic. Because all regulation is evil, I’ll just sack up and wait for The Market to sort it all out 🥰

A Sample of Laissez-Faire Blessings, Delivered Daily #

A most odd thing. Can’t find who recommended it to me. It’s only around 70 pages and is a magical realist retelling of Stalin’s ascent to power and his horrible and bloody legacy due to his involvement with a very licentious¹ and decently interesting vampire coven². There’s this Dorian Gray angle to the story that was rather confusing and I think unnnecessary. I really didn’t understand the ending (or maybe just don’t want to accept it).

Régis Penet captures the hopelessness, danger, and decrepitude very well.

Whoever did the soundtrack deserves a giant raise. Here’s the opening track.

1. Chloe by Joe Pass
   

   I was walking around some place in Manhattan at sunset and took a small break to just stare at things and people and The Algorithm played this and it was a perfect few minutes.

2. Like It Is by COEO
   
3. Deep Down (Remix) by Alok x Ella Eyre x Kenny Dope feat. Never Dull
   
4. Ramalama (Bang Bang) by Róisín Murphy
   

   And here’s dancer Angela Trimbur’s really, really emphatic interpretation. Love it. Reminds me of Rosamund Pike in this Massive Attack video (“Voodoo in My Blood”).

1. curlie = curl + httpie
   

   Or maybe I should STFU and just use cURL…

2. DOSBian will let you run DOSBox, Windows 95/98 on your Raspberry Pi
   
3. Grumpy.Website is a list of UI/UX Abhorrences
   

   Quite a few of them are designed to confuse and/or furstrate the user into increasing Shareholder Value™ but there are many that are firmly in “confusion of ideas” territory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t60MMJH_1ds

Spoilers!

I’m glad I saw it on a projector. Not sure if it’s a political statement (e.g. the chandeleir being their elite privilege (a ridiculous idea, untethered to anything ‘real’ or ‘permanent’) following them or one about the human condition and our fraught, parasitic relationationship with nature or just both. We never know how tall the building is: greed is a bottomless pit. This was years before Sicario and Dune and you can just see Villeneuve’s ease with and penchant for creating huge atmospheres and settings¹.

I sincerely hope that we’re not as abjectly unprepared for some apocalyptic geopolitical event as depicted in the movie, strategically or temperamentally. People just yell at each other, crumble at the smallest setback, and don’t project the kind of professionalism and nerves of steel we assume they’d have in their position, particularly, and dismayingly, those in leadership.

It’s totally, totally different in real life.

The most shocking part of the movie was when an analyst mentions that China was experimenting with AI to manage their defense. I know nothing but hope we continue to stick to Boring Software™ (and floppy disks) in this department.

It’s trying to say something profound or drop a very challenging ‘exercise left up to reader/viewer’ but fails spectacularly with how scattered it is and how much it’s up its own ‘somber’ and ‘meditative’ arse. Tension, TENSION, tension, tension leading up to… nothing at all! And my complaint isn’t the lack of resolution. Like the tension, the monotonous and super-ominous background score befits the script by getting pretty annoying after the first 150 loops.

At least got to see Jared Harris being excellent as usual. “INCLINATION HAS FLATTENED” is a weird sentence.

I’m one of those people who inadvertently dedicate a good chunk of their phone’s storage to pictures of their doggy. This might be the best of the lot.

For now.

Saving some snippets here but Dave Snyder’s article is worth reading, bookmarking, and meditating over (cached).

See also: “Because God Can See”

Sorry you’re too stupid for Monads bro #

This reminds me of one of the worst design decisions in React: useEffect¹. I’ve worked with it for a long while and find that I’m always doing it wrong and worse thinking about it wrong. It’s so simple! You’re just syncing side-effects bro!

It would’ve taken the kind of restraint Dave talks about for an Engineering Leader/Manager to say “I’m glad you’re high on your Functional Programming classes and ambient hype but we’re not doing it, at least not this way. It may be clever, it may simple, but it’s not easy. People who use what we make have a job to do.”

Anyway. All hail jQuery.

The words that came to mind when I saw this poster were exquisite and breathtaking. Wow.

I would be very dismayed if I spent my creative and professional energies on a half-baked abjectly unnecessary UI and UX abomination that neither adds to nor improves my users’ lives, causes confusion and squinting in many, elicits "meh"s from the rest, and leads to lengthy articles on how to disable my disruptive work so the people I purport to serve can get theirs done.

Via DaringFireball with the observation:

A useful guide for today  –  and, I bet, a useful look back at the first versions of Liquid Glass for the future.

Indeed. Looking forward to when Apple admits to making good things worse for no reason and doesn’t double-down on bullshit visions borne of arrogance, fart-sniffing, and desperation.

“iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency with New Toggle” (MacRumors). I still think they should’ve had an option (perhaps a slider) that allowed me to turn off translucency entirely.

Boo #

Wouldn’t have any reservations calling this a ghost story. It’s at least a reverie (to the point I was wondering if Mr. Alfred would pull a “And then he woke up” towards the end) and I’m sure this was intentional. I am 51% sure that Scottie’s actually dead or in a coma in the second half.

Scottie The Alpha #

Scottie is pathetic, weak, creepy, overconfident, and domineering and would make millions on YouTube and/or the podcast circuit.

He pines after a mirage of a woman even when he has a chance to appreciate her in her literal colorful exuberance and cannot brook her as a partner¹ just as she is. He must ‘reset’ her and turn her into a bland object, this canvas he can project himself onto that absorbs all his insecurities and faults.

Now while Judy is pliant, Midge is a strong independent woman who need no man (almost) and has this vibrant and cool apartment full of art. She has several interests, tries different careers, is funny, and likes our boy and cares a lot for him. But nope: He needs her to be devoid of color and personality and ambition to return her affections.

Even my dog appreciated Hitchcock’s self-examination as the Man Who Must Control Women in the belltower scene. Maybe the scope was “as a director” 🤷‍♂️

Falling #

There’s a lot of ‘falling’ here (well duh): in love, off buildings, into graves, into darkness, into madness. I can’t remember a single scene of our hero driving uphill and don’t know what this means but wonder if this is why they picked hilly San Francisco. Speaking of, I love me a good then-and-now and wanted to see what Scottie’s apartment looks like today. That led me to this lovely website called Reels SF maintained by someone who’s been “movie location hunting” in San Francisco for over twenty years! Here’s the Vertigo page.

Disorientation #

Quite a few to pick from but this might be my favorite shot in the movie. I’m trying to learn perspective drawing and this one’s a fantastic exercise.

MOTHMA
You realize what you’ve set in motion?

LUTHEN
It’s time for that as well.

MOTHMA
Palpatine won’t hesitate now.

LUTHEN
Exactly! We need it, we need the fear, we need them to overreact.

MOTHMA
You can’t be serious.

LUTHEN
The Empire has been choking us so slowly we’re starting not to notice. The time has come to force
their hand.

MOTHMA
People will suffer.

LUTHEN
That’s the plan. You’re not angry with me. I’m just saying out loud what you already know. There will
be no rules going forward. If you’re not willing to risk your conscience then surrender and be done with it.

The show’s fierce with its experimentation and appears to have no regard for political neutrality and corporate oversight (even in spite of a staggering budget of $650M); it’s an examination of of how authoritarian regimes evolve and behave, and how they need to destroy our humanity to survive, including that of the people who uphold them because of blind ambition, greed, or rent money. Anyone who kvetches about getting politics out of Star Wars (or Sci-Fi in general) is a prize idiot.

I wonder how many years we’ll have to wait for something like this.

By Alan Lightman, from the very lovely documentary A Trip to Infinity.

I fog up every time I see this. His smile towards the end is an emotional nuke and I’m a blubbery teary happy mess. I think of the Love I have in my life and am so very grateful. Here’s a transcript.

I was looking up at the sky one night when I was about ten years old. And I felt like my life didn’t matter. And I guess it was converting large space to large time. One star after another star after another star and wondering whether that would keep going forever.

I had this sense that the universe existed a long time before I was born, and it would exist a long time after I was dead. And I was just a speck that didn’t matter. I don’t matter. My parents don’t matter. Nothing matters. We’re all just specks. We’re just living in this brief moment.

None of us were here a million years ago. None of us will be here a million years from now. And the Universe doesn’t care. It just goes on and on and on. So, why are we wasting time, you know, going to school, having dentist appointments? All of that.

Why are we wasting our time? Because none of it matters.

And then I fell in love. And that changed everything. That mattered. Even though we might both be specks in the cosmos.

1. Lose My Cool (Franc Moody Remix) by Amber Mark
   

   Listened at Le Cheile in Washington Heights.

2. Do You Think We'll Last Forever? by Caroline Rose
   
3. Cherry Bomb by The Runaways
   
4. Lambent Rag by Clark
   

1. Hacker Laws: A Collection of Wise, Pithy, and Funny Laws for Nerds
   

   (Cached)

2. PostHog's website looks like an OS
   

   And a classic one at that (OS/2 and BeOS vibes). Amazing. Here’s how they did it. Gatsby!

I found this short story on my laptop and have no idea who sent it to me or where I might have downloaded it from. It’s funny and I imagine it would make for a nice children’s book and/or cartoon adaptation.

The document says it’s by Kyr Bylychev. The only search result I get is a Russian sci-fi and fantasy author. It was translated by Seva Gunitsky, who appears to be an American politican scientist.

🤷‍♂️

Star Trek, unbridled TechBro arrogance, rapid and unchecked technological progress, meditations on ancient questions of consciousness, identity, and dynamics of power, gamer culture, very satisfying comeuppance for the baddies… all folded into a funny and whip-smart script, executed with fantastic production value and brought to life by phenomenal acting (Jimmi Simpson, Cristin Milioti, and Jesse Plemons especially).

What else could one want? I’d put these on my Top Ten Black Mirror episode list¹ too. I hope they make a third but the second had a pretty conclusive and satisfying ending. Fantastic stuff.

• Weary master who’s really, really good at something.
• Master is aloof, introverted, irascible. Nobody’s interesting enough.
• Enter precocious, young, raw apprentice. They meet by random chance.
• Cue training montage.
• Apprentice surpasses Master.
• Master deals with the defeat/affront poorly. Substance abuse is triggered. May be brief but must be intense.
• Reconciliation and Wisdom. May occur at Master’s deathbed.

These are all covered in this movie, which is about a Go master and his genius pupil. Based on real-life pair Cho Hun-Hyun and Lee Chang-ho. I know absolutely nothing about the game so thoroughly enjoyed the “Hmmm, his opening gambit is unconventional and rabbit-like” dialogue. In the movie, players in Go world append rank to others’ names. Not sure if that’s the case in real life.

Browsing Wikipedia led me to these quotes by world champion Lee Sedol who turned pro at age 12 (!) and retired after he felt his “world collapsing” due to AI:

Indeed.

He famously played AlphaGo and was defeated 4-1. Here’s the whole documentary. I liked it better than this movie and you may, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

Overall rating: B+. Listen to this album.

Tracks

• Tron

  Rating: B+

  It’s just you inside a giant, empty, grain silo at night somewhere in Northwest Iowa. Three giant, white hot lights far up on the ceiling.

• Dead People's Things

  Rating: B+

  An 18 minute-long lamentation. Reminded me of some tracks from Ghosts I-IV by Reznor and Ross.

• Orgone Donor

  Rating: B+

  This one will arrest your attention. Reminded me of the opening scene of Macbeth (2015, soundtrack by Jed Kurzel). It’s many orders more intense.

• Cloud Chamber

  Rating: B+

  A most fitting, beautiful end.

Like a lot of kids I loved cutaway books (if that’s what they’re called). I would pester my parents for these and had quite a collection. Couldn’t and still can’t imagine the skill it takes to make them. So when I came by these high-res images by an illustrator from the 30s named Fred Freeman, I explored them posthaste on my iPad and saved them here to savor again at a later time.

Might be a tenuous connection but I think my deep love of miniatures might be related to my love of cutaways as 2D/flat dollhouses.

That blog’s a trove of cutaways. The folks who author it run a design agency and have published their own book on such illustrations called Look Inside.

I did like the mood (and soft-spoken narration) of the introduction but I absolutely loved that background music. It’s called Lambent Rag by Clark and is worth a listen and a watch¹.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNrt1FWmPA4

The Air looks nice² but I’ll baby my iPhone 13 Mini, perfection as far as smartphones go, for as long as I can. It was released around this time four years ago and is still going strong.

I was completely mesmerized by the poster for the upcoming movie Bugonia, a “satirical absurdist science fiction dark comedy” (Wikipedia). It was designed by Vasilis Marmatakis who collaborates frequently with the movie’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos. The only film I’ve seen (and twice) by the latter is the eerie Killing of a Sacred Deer.

I went looking for Marmatakis’ other work because I had pressing and important things bearing down upon me and was delighted with my excursion. Thought I’d collect some favorites (could be his entire oeuvre down there). Other favorites are his posters for Nimic and Bleat.

Here’s an interview with him about his process and work on Poor Things¹. Here are his Top Ten favorite posters.

Was getting to know a fellow graduate student.

HIM: I found a cockroach in my apartment.
ME: Me too! Mine is named George. You?
HIM: Mine is Dead.

I ♥️ NY 🪳

1. Music To Refine To by ODESZA
   

1. Some Amazing Things You can do with Modern CSS
   

   Plenty of good stuff on there but this totally blew my mind. Consider this custom tag (should be lowercased and contain hyphens. Emojis are allowed!):

   <cool-thing shadow>wow</cool-thing>
   

   and this valid CSS:

   cool-thing {
       display: flex;
   
       &[shadow] {
           box-shadow: 1px 1px #0007;
       }
   
       @media (screen < 480px) {
           flex-direction: column;
       }
   }
   

   The only thing missing from my beloved SASS are mixins but I suppose you can achieve that by composing attributes (like shadow above). Super cool.

2. Pyro is a "Probabilistic Programming" Library for Python
   
3. XSL Reference
   

   View the source and the stylesheet. Really nice idea to tinker with. The last time I played with XSLT was in 2001!

4. Base is a beautiful SQLite GUI for macOS
   

   Been using the excellent TablePlus for a while but this one seems nice too.

5. fStrings.wtf
   
6. OhYAML.wtf
   
7. LibriVox is a lovely collection of public domain audiobooks
   

I didn’t bother to fact-check the show but I was rather surprised at the relative lack of jingoism and mostly measured portrayal of Pakistani characters as normal people. Let’s just say I didn’t hear as much highbrow and/or phlegm-y Urdu. I also didn’t see as many prayer beads, skullcaps, henna’d beards, or sinister-looking people as I’d expected. Indian productions tend to tell you who the Bad Guys are by deploying unreasonable amounts of eyeliner/kohl onto unpleasant countenances. Didn’t see much of that either.

Excellent work by Sunny Hinduja as intelligence honcho Ali Murtaza and Suhail Nayyar as Rafiq, with a really standout performance by Kapil Radha as Rizwan. Wish they gave Rajat Kapoor more screen-time but he did play a highly private and secretive character.

Nice set design. Average, enjoyable.

On August 15^th, I quit my job¹ and moved to New York City to start graduate school at Columbia University’s Medical Center. Des Moines is still my home base and I’ll be coming back between semesters and over summers.

I will regret not trying this and am very grateful that I am able to do so. This is more of a reorientation of my skills and interests towards a domain I care about deeply². I still love writing software but want to do something that makes healthcare providers’ and recipients’ lives better.

I am way too old and eccentric to have roommates and found University housing in the Washington Heights neighborhood. My studio is ~190ft² and I am thrilled by the rent, location, and amenities.

As of this writing, I’ve been here for about two weeks and it’s already been pretty extraordinary. This city is a hive like none other. I am on schedule to annoy my wife and NYC friends when I turn into this person by the end of the month (cached). I’m publishing my notes from the program here. It’s all very exciting.

Grandma #

My grandmother passed away peacefully at the age of 91. She was my last surviving grandparent. She had a full life and was a good person and a Force of Nature. She was fiercely inquisitive and intelligent and we always wonder what she’d have achieved if she were allowed an education.

I regret not talking to her as much as I should have. I will try and do as much good as I can for other people and dedicate these deeds to her memory.

My buddy GT is reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey (“easy reading, accurate translation, and iambic pentameter throughout”). He noted that Christopher Nolan is making a film about it and worried about the Gods getting excised from the adaptation. Here’s a poster.

Noting the subtitle, he continues:

No, Chris. Don’t “Defy the gods.”

Athena, Hermes, and Zeus actively help him throughout. Sure, Helios and Poseidon try to kill him but, well, that was because “Odysseus had the dumbest fucking crew of anyone who ever sailed the goddamn ocean” (to quote one of my professors).

adding that he wished he could communicate the “total venom” the Professor injected into “dumbest fucking crew”. I find mediocrity, innate or exercised, exceedingly funny. My friend knows this and goes on to make my afternoon.

"Hey, guys. This bag is a gift from those magic people. It holds every possible wind that would oppose our trip home. We’ll be home in a few hours. Don’t fuck with it.”

Later: “He’s sleeping. Maybe there’s treasure in the bag.”

*Ship is blown disastrously off course. Two hours of sailing becomes ten years.*

“Hey, guys. Athena says don’t slaughter and eat those cattle. They belong to the fucking god who controls the goddamn sun. Look, I also have a shitload of fruit and nuts to tide us over.”

Later: “He’s sleeping. Let’s eat them cows.”

*They all get murdered by a hot, angry sun god and their ship gets destroyed.*

Dumbest. Fucking. Crew. That professor also pointed out that every single horrible thing happens when Odysseus falls asleep.

“I’m gonna take a nap.”

Later: “What did you dumbasses do now?”

It’s like King Agamemnon said, “Alright, everyone, let’s pack up our shit and take our fleets home. Hey, Odysseus, a word: you’re the smartest guy I’ve ever met. Let’s, uh, balance out the fleets’ IQs. You take these guys.”

*Odysseus looks over and sees them bending over and devouring sand from the beach.*

“Oh, Athena, help me.”

I imagine this is what that last scene looked like.

“Do you take reservations?”
“How many?”
“Two”
“Just come in. Bye.” *Click*

I ♥️ NY

My friend ML adds “That or it’s ‘earliest booking we have is 2028’.”

Last night, I told the bartender that I needed to step out for a bit and if he needed my card.

“If you fuck off I’ll just have a Guinness won’t I?” and walks away.

I ♥️ NY 🍺

Here’s one way to recycle batteries (via). I remember BestBuy having a battery dropoff but they don’t appear to accept them anymore.

I’ve used Panasonic’s Eneloop rechargeable batteries for a long while with very few complaints. The last ‘regular’ battery I purchased was an Energizer Ultimate Lithium for a 10-year AirTag in my traveling suitcase.

A short meditation my friend Greg Bal. The very first one is of the Pedestrian Mall in Iowa City and I absolutely love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNmbDg5UV_c

It’s also a big, indulgent celebration of Britishness and the country’s Justice System (just noting; feature, not bug).

1. #18 by Aphex Twin
   
2. Polyrhythmic by Phil Kieran
   

   Heard this on my favorite movie this year, Black Bag. The movie’s composer makes a cameo as the DJ who plays this song in the opening scene.

3. Losing It by FISHER
   
4. The Last Goodbye (feat. Bettye LaVette) by ODESZA
   
5. Unakkum Enakkum Anandam (Remix) by Chitra Priya
   
6. Deva Devam Bhaje by MS Subbulakshmi
   
7. Sheolha Sheila by Miami Band
   

1. How to Migrate from RaidZ1 to RaidZ2
   

   There is the purposeful degradation of the pool but I don’t know how else one would do it without buying more disks for a separate pool entirely. Author helpfully provides a lot of links to places you can back up your stuff to (with prices!)

   (Cached)

2. Epified is a Collection of Indian Hindu Mythologies in an Illustration Style I Absolutely Love
   

   That’s a link to the Mahabharata, quite possibly my favorite story ever.

3. Google Sans Code is my new favorite programming font
   
4. FlyonUI is a Tailwind-based UI Component Library
   
5. Dr. Axel's JavaScript Flashcards
   

   He’s also written and published this amazing book.

6. fffuel.co is a lovely collection of CSS and SVG tools
   

   Here’s a lovely noise generator, for example.

7. StatiCrypt will do client-side encryption of static html pages using JavaScript
   

After many years of searching, I finally found the make and model of my childhood typewriter and am beside myself with joy. Anthropic’s free-tier Claude was of tremendous help and I am much obliged.

Behold, and in cursive!

I spent many hours taking it apart (as much as I could), studying it (as much I could), getting scolded by my Dad, and helping him put it back together. I spent untold hours writing stories and letters on this thing. One of the last things I remember authoring was a Sherlock Holmes short story, a thrilling three-pager, double-sided, written in furious haste after I found out that I’d read the entire canon¹.

It was a beautiful machine. I don’t remember what happened to it and wish I still had it. Here are a few more gorgeous glamour shots.

Elsewhere #

Here’s a Reddit post on the Typewriter, and its entry on the Typewriter Database.

Haven’t played a good point-and-click adventure/mystery game in a long while and this one brought back a flood of memories of my sister and I playing the excellent Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Made me wonder if there’s an open-source engine one could use to make games like these (e.g. the SCUMM engine used in the Monkey Island games) and found out that the creators use the free Adventure Game Studio Engine for their titles.

This is a short and clever game. You can finish it, with all its alternate endings, in about an hour. Like Gabriel Knight and Monkey Island, the emphasis is more on the storytelling than anything flashy. And this is a fantastic and short story that’s serious and funny at the same time: deep spiritual questions and conundrums, Talmudic combat, Rabbinical banter, small business struggles, life in NYC, and so on.

Here’s the plot:

A former member of his congregation has died and left the Rabbi a significant amount of money. A blessing? Or the start of something far more sinister? Can Rabbi Stone just accept the money and move on? His conscience says no. Step into his shoes as he travels all over Manhattan in his attempt to uncover the truth.

I’ll be playing a lot more games by Wadjet Eye, perhaps starting with this one. They’re a two-person studio in Brooklyn and appear to be cool people.

Screenshots #

Some Yiddish Words from The Game #

I accidentally committed the faux pas of hitting reply-all on a message yesterday. One of the affected participants replied-to-all starting with a “Dear Nikhil: Thank you for connecting all of us over this issue.”

A masterclass in civility 🤌

In German so I needed a translation.

I have spent a lot of time trying to kill a tube of toothpaste and am now convinced that the last 10% of the tube hosts 90% of its payload. The Pareto Principle in action, in defiance of physical laws.

What I say each time I engage with the cornucopia of paste:

My personal record is nine bills for the same, minor urgentcare visit.

Things I’ve learned: It’s not your provider’s job to deal with insurance, it’s yours. Don’t pay outright¹. You’ll keep getting clobbered until every single service provider has billed you. Call them whenever you get billed. Be polite. Request a proper itemized statement with as much detail as possible. Takes a while for things to catch up.

This is what you are to do with the limited time you have on this planet. Make sure you enjoy the Free Market ♥️

Behold this stunning 3D model of some of the activity around the really massive Black Hole at the center of our lovely galaxy. It’s called Sagittarius A* and is some 4 million times more massive than our Sun.

Humanity banded together to take a ‘photo’ of it in 2017. This video’s from that year. The data involved in making it¹ was proof-positive that there’s a Black Hole at the center of our galaxy. Professors Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel shared a Nobel Prize (with Roger Penrose) in 2020 for their work leading up to this discovery.

Each second of this is two years and it’s happening ~25,000 light years away from us. Young stars are in green, old ones are in orange. We do not know the age of the stars in magenta.

S2 #

At the end of the video, you see “Orbits extrapolated from 1893 - 2013”. There are two star orbits that they did not extrapolate and actually observed completely. These stars are named S2, which makes a full loop in ~16 years, and S102, which does this is ~12 years. Here’s a video showing S2 (note the top right!)

This is space and the numbers are always crazy so here goes: S2 has a highly egg-shaped orbit and gets to ~120 times the distance between us and the Sun² at its closest approach where, this enormous thing that’s ~14 times the mass of our Sun is moving at 3% the speed of light (~5,600 miles/second, ~9,000 km/second). At highway speeds, it would take you 10 million years to complete its orbit.

I wonder if we’ll ever truly comprehend the truly staggering scales involved in the architecture of existence. Electrons, atoms, galaxies, Black Holes. Like teaching a gnat calculus. Oh well. Here’s a guy driving to the nearest star:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcJHHU9upyE

Update #

Here’s a video from the European Southern Observatory that zooms in to the Giant Black Hole at The Center of Our Galaxy that shows the aforementioned star (S2) looping around it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRCD-zx5QFA

Pretty bad.

Not issuing a spoiler warning will save you time. The writers might as well have ended this limping and interminable whodunnit with “And then he woke up” to the same effect. It’s adapted from a play which I haven’t read.

What it really is, however, is a (many times hectoring) ultra-conservative commentary on parent-child relationships. The normative here is unhealthy and lopsided: parents and elders are to have no limits or boundaries in speech or action, and are to be obeyed and served immediately and without protest. Your plans for your life and career are inextricably tied to their whims and sanction, even when they’re a model of health. Pursuing your goals is tantamount to egregious neglect. At least in this universe, personal space, phone and video calls, regular visits, and healthy and respectful communication are poor substitutes to the obedience and groveling mandated by culture and tradition.

It’s an abandonment fantasy for affluent 65+ Indian parents, essentially that curse of a movie Baghban wrapped in a threadbare and dogshit ‘mystery’.

Patekar’s still got it though 💯

Never really understood the protagonist’s motivation in the second season. There were several ways in which he could’ve achieved his objectives without resorting to the stupidest course of action possible. But then again, the show was a global sensation and needed to be milked for every ounce of shareholder value it could generate. There needed to be an entire new season. So let’s pepper some sense of justice and moral immediacy over the moronic masterplan our jaded boy chooses to resolve his trauma from Season One and pull more episodes. People are here for the rollercoaster, they won’t care. I certainly didn’t.

(Spoiler below)

The third season was as unnecessary as it was terrible. A self-indulgent, nonsensical plotline afraid of a terminus (Steven Moffat pulled the same garbage at the finale of Sherlock). It’s abundantly clear that they blew the budget by the time it came to hiring actors for the sadistic “VIPs”. Also features the calmest CGI baby ever¹. His highly likely dimwittedness aside, there was zero logical need for our hero to sacrifice himself. Even within the improbable world of the show, very little of the plot made sense in this season.

There’s talk of a prequel (of course). I’m getting off this rollercoaster. Enough’s enough 🎢

Old Dutch Ripples All-Dressed (left) are the best potato chips you can and should eat. Exquisite texture, volume, and flavor. The peer Ketchup chips (right) are a worthy second.

I am truly in awe of Old Dutch’s commitment and execution: they’re not messing around when they say “savory”. These are not meant to be consumed absent-mindedly and will arrest your attention. Every other chip is a bland and greasy bleh compared to what I’m talking about here.

Fat claim but I remain firm. You may disagree but you’d be wrong (and unsatisfied).

1. Guncha Koi by Mohit Chauhan
   
2. Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan
   
3. Toura Toura (Remix) by DJ Cheb i Sabbah
   

1. Everything You Need to do Math in Bash
   
2. How to Write a Programming Language in JavaScript
   
3. The Useless Web is a lovely collection of games and creative stuff
   
4. Everything You Need to Know About Import Maps
   

   (Cached)

5. UbuWeb is a large collection of avant-garde art and media
   

   Been around since 1996!

6. CanIDev.tools is a publicly curated list of things you can do with Web Developer Tools across all major browsers
   
7. nuqs is a nice little query param library for React
   
8. Goodlinks is an Instapaper Alternative with mobile and desktop UIs
   

   Looks lovely. $9.99 on the App Store, one-time purchase, sort of: you purchase up to a year of feature updates.

9. Mousecape is a Cursor Manager for macOS
   

   Good old-school fun. I miss being able to theme OS X. How much fun is this? I hope Apple doesn’t bork whatever makes this work.

10. Some Glorious Terminal Text Effects
    

    Written in Python. Not sure where I’d use them. Reminded me of Charm.

Spoilers! #

Tristan Ulloa is dismayingly excellent as the vulnerable, love-struck, randy, manipulated, and jilted lover Salva, who finally confesses to the plot after finding out that his paramour, the “Black Widow of Patraix”, started a relationship with another inmate (because of course). There’s also this unfortunate turn of events:

The setup is pretty funny. I love the director’s style. Ellen Parren is excellent as Lara. Nothing particularly remarkable or original about the story: “What if machines were sapient?” is a pretty old question to explore. The kind of intelligence you see in movies and stories like these is far, far away, regardless of TechBro promises. I am more interested in the behaviour of the humans towards these artificial beings. Tends to be pretty shitty most of the time and I do wonder why (there are exceptions).

Here it is on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VrLQXR7mKU

This installment is a lot more flow-y and organic and twisty than the first one (still haven’t played the second) and it’s still exceedingly beautiful. There’s also this delightful animated short they released to whet appetites before launch. And that’s really the word: This series continues to be a delightful work.

I was told that I should play the 2008 Echochrome next. It looks like if you crossed Monument Valley and Antichamber.

Netflix #

Was rather surprised to see Netflix branding. The TL;DR as far as I can tell (and in order): They got Netflix money, didn’t want to pay the Apple tax, and state that they wanted to avoid making creative compromises to be visible in a horribly curated, spam and garbage-filled App Store. That may be the case but, given the original and its sequel’s immense success, I do not find that last part believable. Good on them for getting paid though 💸

Screenshots etc because I couldn’t help myself #

My brain issued lots of happy chemicals when I saw this illustration by Kevin Eric Raymundo AKA Kalbo.

Could be a popular setup for 90s kids but he might as well have found an old photo of our family computer setup: that entire frame, wheels, dot-matrix printer, 14" monitor, tower, mouse (with trackball), mouse pad with the edges lifted off slightly, a keyboard you could kill a wild boar with, boxy underpowered speakers, single CD-ROM and 3.5" disk drives.

Uncanny.

I love that the kid just turned it on and it’s the boot screen¹. Hours of fun and exploration are to follow. What a lovely time.

Unrelated but I also love this illustration of the Late Pope by the same artist 😇

Featuring several seasoned negotiators listening in on the master class.

Forget where I saw this illustration but I love it and had a lovely time drawing some versions of it myself, experimenting with various shadings.

It’s from a book called Géologie by Marcel Oria, published by Hatier press in 1958. This is what its cover looks like.

And it’s quite the story: love, lust, betrayal, spirituality, filicide, redemption, wisdom, general chicanery, geopolitics, racism. The artwork is fantastic and hypnotic².

In a thousand years, I’ve heard of hundreds of wars and massacres, most of which have been forgotten. An evil force is at work in the world, a terrible law that requires the weak, the dreamers, and the gentle souls to disappear to benefit the powerful. In the end, there will be nothing left but a hardened, greedy race, drunk on the power it has acquired over the centuries. An iron-fisted race, a thousand times more violent than it is today. And I’m glad to know I won’t be here to see it.

I mean… silly stories, right?

SPOILERS (SORT OF) #

“I don’t think you’re a killer. You seem like the kind of guy who’d willingly donate blood to a mosquito.”

and

“I don’t have a good feeling about him. He’s overcompensating like a Telugu movie comedian in his debut film. Tap his phone and have him tailed.”

I love these drawings by Matt Decker. I saw a an entire sheet of them at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (the artist’s from Rochester) and am glad to note they’re available through his Etsy page. They’re all giclée fine art prints, signed by the artist.

Here are a few favorites. Three dames and two very Minnesotan bros.

AUSTIN, TX—Stressing that the billionaire’s completely erratic behavior had strained the already fraught relationships, sources confirmed Thursday that a rift was widening between Elon Musk and anyone who had ever met him. “Elon’s megalomania and tendency to lash out indiscriminately seem to have soured things with every person he’s encountered in his entire life,” said an anonymous source close to the embattled tech mogul, adding that Musk’s staunch refusal to engage in self-reflection or address his many off-putting personal tics had so far estranged him from the White House, his business partners, his neighbors, the mothers of his children, the children themselves, interviewers, investors, restaurant waitstaff, and all others who had directly interacted with him in any manner for any length of time. “These acquaintances are making every effort to distance themselves from Elon, whom they have come to see as a liability and a hindrance to their goals. Even those who have only briefly dealt with him over social media say they no longer wish to be associated. It’s obviously a bad look to have blown up every last one of his interpersonal connections, but knowing Elon, that’ll only make him dig in his heels and make things even worse.” The source added that while the acrimony between Musk and everyone he had ever met was likely irreversible, the falling out had only strengthened his relationship with ketamine.

These are our idols. What a world.

1. Touch It (Deep Remix) by Busta Rhymes
   

   Here’s the version I heard on Instagram. Fantastic stuff.

1. postmarketOS is Linux for your Smartphone
   
2. Hereby is a Task Runner for Node
   
3. reAMP is WinAMP for macOS
   

   Written in Swift. Last update was in 2020. There’s also WebAMP, whose Skin Gallery puts a smile on my face.

4. Keka, an Unarchiver for macOS
   

   Because The Unarchiver now shows fucking ads.

   

   Yes, I am complaining about a free thing. I have zero problem paying for the application and/or for the ads to go away. We drown in enough shit as it is. Does make me think why I need a separate unarchiver… perhaps for RAR files?

Read these two articles on the OpenAI and Jony Ive collab. Smelled some familiar bullshit first and felt some déjà vu next.

Thought the biggest thing you set out to do was Artificial General Super Intelligence (for the benefit of all humankind, of course).

Anyway. Ive’s company has a “staff of roughly 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists and product development specialists” (source) who appear to be experimenting furiously with what to make, for this is what we’re told the thing will do:

The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users off of screens. Altman said the device also isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.

Sounds like a sleeker version of this flaming piece of shit daring foray into the future of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction:

Can’t wait for the Ive video introducing it. And he wouldn’t be the first ex-Apple person with too much money who had an idea on how to transform our relationship with our computers. Altman invested in that disaster too.

But I’m a know-nothing curmedgeon and it’s certainly possible that this will be an unalloyed success in the hands of these wizened titans of industry (even if Uber-Curmudgeon Ed Zitron doesn’t think so.) I wish the happy couple the very best of luck 💝

I think the claim is that anarchy, which Moore defines as a state of being without leaders but not without order, is the only effective resistance to runaway fascism.

He explores a lot of the latter’s properties: It happens slowly, then suddenly. It metastasizes slowly with both the apathy and consent of a majority. And when it’s here, it’s too late; all resistance (other than anarchy of course) is merely symbolic.

Now because there is no firm philosophical center to fascism other than outgroup hate and appeals to some glorious, prosperous, and fictitious age of yore¹, it will collapse and destroy everyone involved, including the usual prey of minorities and immigrants and other People Not Like Us.

Moore gives space to almost every character to illustrate this. Like the average person, whether or not they’re True Believers:

Or the bourgeois Top 9.99%³, including a few aspiring token minorities who consider themselves the ‘Right People’, who surrender any prior conviction, morality, and common decency to self-aggrandizement (or preservation).

But all this cannot happen at this point in (the end of) history. Alarmist hogwash. Zero contemporary parallels. There is no oligarchic capture of democratic institutions. Wealth inequality is at an all-time low. Unchecked globalization was a raring success. Billionaires need more tax breaks and we are obliged to feel proud when unfettered Capitalism creates the first Trillionaire. The ongoing privatization or outright elimination of public institutions and goods and services will cure the most unfortunate amongst us of their moral and spiritual failings. All xenophobic and economic nationalist movements like Brexit were triumphs of sovereignty and self-determination.

Social Media companies must exercise their Free Speech rights by absolving themselves of all ethical responsibility to moderate their platforms (“Corporations are People, my Friend”). Think of the shareholders and the executives and their famished households. Climate Change is natural, hence does not require interventions (what would God think?), and will not result in mass humanitarian and allied migration crises. Survival of the Fittest bro, where’s your bunker (or Mars Colony) invite? Taxation and regulation are for communists. Empathy is weakness. Up is down. East is West. Wrong is Right.

So yeah. No way any of this is building up to anything. Stop listening to hysterical candyasses. It’s not as bad as it seems⁴. This book is a work of fiction written by a crazy disheveled anarchist and augurs nothing. Relax. Like and subscribe, sign up for my newsletter, buy my coin, and pay for my course on disruptive innovation, bro.

V is Annoying #

V is portrayed to be very intelligent, well-read and cultured, and an expert planner and strategist. No disagreement here. But Lord is he annoying when he opens his damn mouth. Here’s his reply when Evie asks a perfectly simple “You’re almost finished aren’t you?”

Took me two and a half passes to get through that thicket. More of a yes or no question, Vincenzo. And pray how is the poor girl supposed to react to that edgelord logorrhea? “Uh… word.”

And that’s just a sample. It’s not enough that he literally tortures her: almost every simple thing she enquires of him leads her to a linguistic hostage situation. There’s no direct answer to anything asked of him, presumably to show that he’s some posthuman “4D Chess” level above the rest. He kept reminding me of a few good-hearted assholes I knew in college, over the age of twenty mind you, who texted and sometimes spoke like this for no fucking reason.

ME: “Hey you want a beer?”

ELLIOT: “Unequivocally. Chilled ferments shall slake my thirst and refresh my frayed cognitive apparatus. You have both my company and gratitude this evening, sir.”

ME: “Word.”

Great book though. I’m sure I’ll read it again. Looking forward to reading something happier.

by Unknown

This reading comes from the resource Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior.

In the introduction to Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, writer Cynthia Ozick states,

Indifference is not so much a gesture of looking away — of choosing to be passive — as it is an active disinclination to feel. Indifference shuts down the humane, and does it deliberately, with all the strength deliberateness demands. Indifference is as determined — and as forcefully muscular — as any blow. Indifference to past suffering is a sure sign that there will be indifference to present suffering.

Throughout the reading “No Time to Think,” the slow, incremental, yet willful choice to not act, to become a bystander and to remain indifferent is revealed. Ozick reminds us that the bystander—the one who does not take part in any evil act directly, but turns away —is still a participant. “the act of turning away, however empty-handed and harmlessly, remains nevertheless an act.”

Milton Mayer, an American college professor, wanted to find out how ordinary people reacted to Hitler’s policies and philosophy. Seven years after the war, he interviewed German men from a cross-section of society. One of them, a college professor, told Mayer how he responded.

So Much Activity #

[My] Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was “expected to” participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.

Too Busy to Think #

…The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your “little men,” your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about – we were decent people – and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose we were grateful. Who wants to think.

Waiting to React #

One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not? – Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, which restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty #

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings; yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your older friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to – to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

Small Steps #

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes millions, would have been sufficiently shocked – if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

Too Late #

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Living with New Morals #

You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Endnotes #

¹ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, 177-181

Connection Questions #

1. Why did the professor obey? What factors led to his decision? How did he evaluate that decision nearly twenty years later? How do you evaluate it? Why does he emphasize the small steps he took? How do each of those small steps make it easier to take no action at all?

2. Draw an identity chart for the professor. What aspects of his identity may have influenced the
   decisions he made in 1933? How do you think life in a world dominated by fear affected the choices
   he made?

3. Reread Peter Drucker’s decision (Reading 8). Compare it to those described in this reading. Does an individual have the responsibility to take a stand? When? Under what circumstances?

4. How might “thinking” have made a difference in the professor’s decisions? At what point did the
   state take on so much power or the person give up so much power that human qualities were suppressed in the name of patriotism? Is it possible to think too much? Can thinking too much
   paralyze one’s responses?

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876 - 1950) was a renowned painter and printmaker who traveled far and wide. These are a few from his 32-panel “India and Southeast Asia” series. I found myself staring at each for a long while and am absolutely in love¹.

“Ni lerdo, Ni Perezoso”

My co-worker from Argentina shared this idiom after another delivered some delightful Friday Value™. It means “neither slow nor lazy” and is commonly used to describe people who attend to a situation quickly, decisively, and sometimes unexpectedly, with no hesitation.

No math/equations. Just clear and concise overviews of topics. Made as a video to fall asleep to!

I’d say things are going pretty well.

A three-hour rundown of the game’s mythology from the 1992 Mortal Kombat to 2023’s Mortal Kombat 1 by ClementJ64. For a more extensive historical overview that doesn’t get into the mythology, there’s Ian Scherer’s excellent “The History of Mortal Kombat”¹. Lots of dedicated research in both videos for a beloved thirty year-old franchise.

And there’s no “Game of Thrones”-level storytelling or world-building here. It’s a fighting video game where the characters’ abilities matter more than their stories or relationships. It’s fairly cogent but they do make things up as needed from one title to the next and every fan adjusts accordingly and is A-OK with the good fun of it all². The only thing of importance to me is whether Sub-Zero and Scorpion are bros or sworn enemies across successive titles.

I didn’t think of the resources the game devs saved by giving us a nice rainbow palette of ninja-clones³ and this makes total sense. At least in the Good Old Days, color replacements and eleventh-hour backstories were cheaper than the space and memory required for brand new characters.

It’s an old and ingenious trick and I love it.

Plus #

My cousin introduced me to the very first title and I was hooked. My dad bought us Mortal Kombat 3 for the PC at GITEX and I still remember my amazement and excitement. My sister and I spent a lot of time playing it (my favorites were Sub-Zero and Sektor and hers Sonya Blade, Sheeva, and Scorpion). Good times 🥋 And there was, of course, the absolutely legendary soundtrack.

My favorite memory is when we learned that there was a secret character (Smoke the Ninja) that we couldn’t unlock. My sister and I wrote a letter to Midway, to their address on the box (it was in the UK iirc), asking for help. A month later, a full guide showed up with happy notes from a few people. What a gesture; I wish I still had this most lovely document. We were beside ourselves with excitement but I wish we wrote a thank you letter.

Should I need to duel my sister after twenty-four years, there’s Mortal Kombat+, which is a set of enhancements and bugfixes to the original trio of games. Fight!

And if you’re as old and uncool as I am:

But that’s not entirely accurate. There’s an important distinction.

Not looking up “waifu”. I think enough’s enough here.

1. Kamukamo-Shikamo-Nidomokamo by haku
   

   About as addicting as a song can get. It’s cover of this song by Mono No Aware. Amazing.

2. Encore by Alim Qasimov et al
   

   Absolutely breathtaking. Qasimov’s apparently a big deal in Azerbaijan. His daughter sang with Nusrat!

3. Jo by Goldfrapp
   

   BLN sent me this and I’ve listened to it on loop for the past few days (overcast weather is the perfect complement). Simply sublime.

1. Navidrome is a free, open-source music player with a web UI
   

   Here’s a demo site (demo:demo). I was able to launch it in under 30 seconds (M2 MacBook Air, 24GiB) against a ~200GiB music library.

   UX and beets integration aside, it’s essentially what I tried to build a long while ago. A simple music player (based on Rust/Golang, SQLite, and simple Web APIs) whose UI made sense to normal and reasonable people and not ambitious product managers.

2. Fintunes allows you to access JellyFin audio from anywhere
   

   Another, native iOS, app is Manet. Yet another is Finamp. I use Plex and not Jellyfin. There appears to be an official such app for Plex called Plexamp.

3. Advanced Shell-Scripting with bash
   

   Been writing bash scripts for over 15 years now. Learned a lot from this presentation. There’s also this advanced bash scripting guide I’ve referred to for a while now.

4. A Half-Hour Guide to Writing your Name in Hieroglyphs
   

Overall rating: Aundefined

Tracks

• Mirage

  Rating: A

  Hypnotic af.

• Taurus

  Rating: A
• Kong

  Rating: A
• Rattlesnake

  Rating: A

  My favorite track by a mile. A most lovely pace to it. Somehow reminds me of vintage Bollywood background scores (especially the ones backing villains or chase scenes).

This is super-cool. They place a piece of Uranium Oxide in a cloud chamber and you can actually see two kinds of radioactive ‘bullets’ just flying out of the sample:

1. Alpha particles, which make shorter and chonkier streaks because they’re Helium nucleii which are much heavier than:
2. Beta particles which make longer and thinner streaks as they’re light little electrons (or positrons)

The soundtrack’s by David Holmes, a longtime collaborator (did the Oceans trilogy with him, for example). At just 28 minutes, it’s as brief and engrossing as the movie.

I did wonder how most characters managed to look ridiculously dapper and live and work in spacious and sumptuously furnished homes and offices on their government salaries.

The typeface used in the poster and titles is Aristotelica, a “rounded geometric sans” that, like all other elements (soundtrack, locations, pacing), just fits the movie as well as Pierce Brosnan’s bespoke suits.

And they still won’t leave him alone.

What’s different this time: There’s this whole John Wick-style Russian criminal brotherhood involved here. I really didn’t give a shit about this setup or any character, with the exception of Andrej Kaminsky as uberboss Symon Kharchenko. He speaks softly, moves slowly, and there’s this Anton Chigur-like menace to him¹.

It was needlessly long too. I’ll just wait for the next one 🙏 My bet on which sweaty and grimy blue-collar job it’ll be is Welder. A close second is Logger, and in some really, really remote place where he can use his jungle combat and tracker (and trap-setting) skills 🔥

by /r/triphop

A crowdsourced list of the best trip-hop songs with each letter of the alphabet. Most popular are Massive Attack and Portishead (no surprises here). Here’s a YouTube playlist.

See also: Top 10 Essential Albums as voted by the community.

The physical book itself, a hardcover, is very nicely done. Sturdy: excellent binding and high-quality glossy paper. I pick it up once in a while to meditate over the story and art.

Speaking of the art. It’s this two and many times three-dimensional clay, cardboard, Elmers glue, and paint chiarascuro that they spent a lot more time working on compared to the story. Just two artists exploring a new direction both for their individual selves and as a team, and saying no to each other but not to the motive force of the project itself.

And I think that’s really what this work is. An experiment in collaboration by two very talented artists and visual storytellers. I think I’d get the same enjoyment from the book if I paid more attention to getting lost in the art and skipping every other page of text. I can see why someone would be upset by its length, however.

As for what it means, I think it’s about Nature, perhaps our blue-green home, about how much she sustains and forgives us. And we just keep taking 🤷‍♂️. But it’ll all be fine. The last few pages reminded me of this prophet:

1. Dam Mast Qalandar by Rushil Ranjan
   

   An orchestral version of a favorite Nusrat song? Lovely. And that tabla solo is for the Gods.

2. Green to Blue by daniel.mp3
   
3. Colors by Black Pumas
   

   The video is just magnificent and never fails to make me tear up for no reason.

4. Down To The River To Pray by Allison Krause
   

   My wife told me her voice is “as clear as a bell” and how can you disagree?

5. Percolator by Cajmere
   
6. 50 Ft Queenie by PJ Harvery
   
7. Theeb by Moayad
   

1. xan is a stupidly powerful CSV parsing and visualization tool
   
2. hidutil key remapping generator for macOS
   

   I use the excellent Karabiner for my keyboard but this appears to be a more ‘native’ solution. Here’s a copy of the repository.

3. CASCII is a lovely ASCII editor for the browser
   

   And it’s a single file! I’ve cached it here. This is a lite version of one of my favorite apps, the excellent (and surprisingly cheap) MonoDraw for macOS.

4. ZX is a Node-based Scripting Tool by Google
   

   Lovely little wrappers around child_process, it looks like. I love Bun’s shell-scripting feature and am glad to note that the same elegant (eye of the beholder, leave me alone) syntax is available in Node via zx.

Agatha Christie-type whodunnit. The genius detective, played supremely well by Uzo Aduba, is an avid bird-watcher and issues deductions (when challenged) with an enthusiasm, arrogance, and cadence that would make modern Sherlock proud. Or jealous.

Here’s Pete Holmes’ version of what I mean. If you haven’t seen this, it’s one of my favorite things as a giant fan of Doyle’s works.

Now since we’re dealing with an American show, there’s a very high likelihood that its writers will banish all editors, disable their Delete keys, and turn five episodes into eight, unlike their British peers who know how to end things on a high note. This show suffers from this problem, though not too much. I may have uttered “Oh come the fuck on” a few times during the detective’s (seemingly) 18-hour summation scene.

But this is a funny-as-hell, intriguing, and well-acted and produced mystery with plenty of twists and red herrings.

I will never forget the character of the hapless White House Calligrapher for as long as I live. Even thinking about him’s making me laugh right now. Splendid stuff.

Saving this since I look it up at least once a year.

Enjoyed this two-part video titled “How We Measure The Cosmos” by 3Blue1Brown where ace mathematician Terry Tao explains how human beings answered the question “How far away is that thing?” over our history and at a cosmic scale. Took us a good while and, as one could predict, got faster towards the current time. Trying to answer that question also led us to discover (and only around 100 years ago!¹) that our galaxy is merely one of 100-200 billion in the observable universe².

In that video, Prof. Tao talks about how you can infer the shape of the Earth based on the shadow it casts on the moon. Some searching led me to this amazing image. This is not what happens in the sky, however. You’ll need to imagine a fern frond³ unfurling to form a nice long arc when you meditate over it:

1. "Oh What Fresh Hell is This?"
   
2. Seeing Theory is a Visual Introduction to Probability and Statistics
   
3. (Primarily) Interface Icons by zwoelf
   

   They’re thin and delightful. 600 of them. Found them on this Floating UI component site.

4. Live-Reloading Middleware for Bun.js
   

   A pretty comprehensive solution! I was looking for this when attempting to learn me some Bun and make a small script that would live-reload a single page (with SASS and Tailwind). And voila: a significantly better solution than the duct tapey thing I came up with 🤣

5. Pixabay is a very large collection of royalty-free media
   

   Found it via this repository.

6. Tart lets you run VMs on macOS
   

   Very cool. More CLI than UTM. Another is Lima.

From The Future World of Agriculture, published in 1984.

A lot of what’s depicted here has actually come to pass. Including that truck, a strange hybrid of a GMC Jimmy and a Corvette, that’s still cooler than a CyberTruck.

Wasn’t too far off (surprisingly). It was his favorite movie for this sort of pleasure:

And then there’s this exchange:

CHARLIE
Oh, what’s the matter with you two ? Do you always have to talk about killing people?

HERB
We’re not talking about killing people.

JOSEPH
Herb’s talking about killing me, and I’m talking about killing him.

ANN
It’s your father’s way of relaxing.

CHARLIE
Can’t he find some other way to relax? Can’t we have a little peace and quiet without dragging in poisons all the time?

This really sad article (cached) on how the author lost an older loved one to the unbelievable racket that’s Amway contains the most hopeful passages I’ve read about the current times. Emphasis and exorcism mine:

It’s hard to leave a delusion behind. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, I noticed the ways in which ****p’s political followers likewise struggled to abandon him. Some prominent ****p supporters may see him as a means to wealth or power. Others find meaning and community—or even vindication—in accepting the lies he tells. Maybe, eventually, when they see what his second administration delivers, some voters will peel away.

That’s what happened with Amway. The company is still a multibillion-dollar, global enterprise, though its domestic profile is now so much smaller that it has a page on its own website answering the question: “Does Amway still exist?” In the end, more people left than stayed. Those who came to their senses or were unable to sustain the delusion eventually quit. But things can get bleak in the middle.

This too shall pass. Let’s hope that we are all strong in what we choose to build after it does¹. But it’s going to suck for a while, and for the most vulnerable amongst us. Thoughts and prayers.

I couldn’t imagine how they built that exquisitely complex and claustrophobic set. Luckily enough, Adam Savage had the same question and met the people who made it. Even if you’re not into this sort of thing, the video is worth a watch to appreciate just how insanely creative people can be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZe41z8L1ME

The soundtrack… oh my the soundtrack. Just so beautiful and befitting. By Atli Övarsson, who joins his Icelandic brethren in creating ‘that’ sound. Think Ludwig Göransson for The Mandalorian, Jóhann Jóhannsson for Sicario, Hildur Guðnadóttir for Chernobyl¹. Don’t work for Pitchfork and will resist a description (which would’ve included words like “congruent”) but it’s one of those things where I now stand a pretty good chance of guessing if the composer were Icelandic.

All that being said, the second season was okay and we decided we don’t really care about the unanswered questions and the cliffhanger and won’t be finishing the two others they have planned.

Steve Zahn is an excellent actor.

There’s a new Captain America who’s trying to find his footing in the MCU following the very dignified and demure exit of Steve Rogers. This new Captain has

• His iconic shield from the old guy
• Wings via someone called the Falcon
• which have been enhanced by Vibranium via a Black Panther/Wakanda hookup, and
• a Helmet from Ant Man

This amazing armor lets him do pretty anything he’d like, even if he didn’t consume serum for spiritual purposes. However, even with all these blessings, he stops the big bad villain by asking him to be nice for a fucking change.

The only saving grace here is Anthony Mackie’s earnest performance.

There’s a villain with a disgustingly severe acne problem whose superpower is his ability to compute the probabilities of various events. He is sold to us as a genius… who is stymied and thwarted non-stop by his nemesis and, presumably due to therapy, is pretty vocal with just how surprised he is at how things pan out. I get that he never exactly says he’d be 100% successful but this is laughable “So you’re telling me there’s a chance” territory here.

There’s also Harrison Ford. We saw this clip of him on Conan before the movie began and this is all I could think of. Yes, he points at stuff. And he slays at 82. It’s rather amazing. Ford was 50 when The Fugitive came out (an all-time favorite) and he’s capable of as much intensity. What a star.

He plays the President of the United States, who is an unstable character, estranged from his family, addicted to power, and turns into a giant red monster who destroys the White House. Silly stories right?

This child plays a minor character who has as much impact on the story as any one of the random NPC prison guards or soliders who litter every scene.

There’s a coalition of global powers that features France, India, USA, Japan, and a Conspicuous Absence 🇨🇳 Too big of a market to sully with disasters I suppose. The action sequences were really cool though, particularly the Navy battle (between the US and its archenemy Japan).

I had a giant pretzel, a pizza, and two enormous servings of club soda.

1 #

I’m surviving a lovely winter in Iowa. And by lovely I mean bitterly cold and windy. It’s always the wind that gets you. We just had a nice big scheduled February snowstorm and it was just beautiful to behold from inside the house.

Found myself consuming a lot of podcasts attentively. I am hoping to put up some notes on this site soon. A favorite one has been Sean Carroll’s Mindscape. I subscribed to If Books Could Kill and a huge fan of the hosts’ snark and humor ♥️

All else remains boring and blissful and blessedly so. Wife, friends, movies, books, dog, tiny crafts, programming, learning, and humor where I can find it. Boring and uneventful is simply fantastic where I am in life. I’ve also put on around 15lbs over the past few months in Holiday + Winter weight. It’s nice being lazy. I have begun fasting on Sundays. Nothing too extreme: tea, coffee, soup maybe. Just keep the calories under 500 or so. I used to have this practice about ten years ago and still remember the mental and physical benefits. And I do need both if I am to emerge mostly-okay after the next few years.

2 #

A lot as changed in the world since the last time I updated this. To save my sanity, I’ve unsubscribed from almost everything news-related. The only way I know of what’s happening is via friends and family (and mostly through memes) which is some kind of attenuation of the non-stop barrage of information on things completely outside of my control.

by the inimitable Mr. Lovenstein

1. TV Remote by Ahmed El Dogary
   

1. Tipi appears to be a super-easy Home Server
   

   Thing I like about projects like these (another example would be LinuxServer) is studying their humongous list of FOSS apps.

2. HyperUI is an Open Source Collection of Tailwind Components
   
3. BatFi gives you full control over how your Mac laptop is charged
   

   You can use System Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health -> Info Icon to toggle this “ML” approach where macOS (and the developers who know more than you about how to care for your Mac) will handle this for you but I’ve never gotten it to work as expected despite docking my laptop repeatedly, and for half the day, over a year.

   You can buy it on Gumroad or here’s a download link.

4. Doppler is an iTunes/Music alternative
   

   Another is Swinsian which looks like iTunes of yore but doesn’t have dark mode (and, not that this means anything, appears to have no updates since 2018).

   Both apps are paid. An Open-Source manager is the Strawberry Music Player

Andrew Howard is frighteningly good as the cop (or ‘The System’). Pulls an effortless Racist Pesci and is Welsh!

Controversy over it being similar in spirit to this 4-minute super short film called “Groundhog Day For A Black Man” by Cynthia Kao.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEMIUy_ySA4

I say ‘little’ relative to all else it finds itself in. Read some place that if the Milky Way were the size of the United States, our ‘little’ Sun would be the size of… drumroll… a grain of sand someplace in the Midwest 🫠🌽

This is a really immersive movie. It’s Eggers’ fourth and we’ve seen all of them. The Witch is still our favorite, followed by The Northman. Lily-Rose Depp was just terrific and just might be to some lucky director whatever Helena Bonham Carter was to Tim Burton. The movie just kept vacillating between Eggers’ unique style and vision to that of those insipid (but totally fun) “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” flicks. I don’t think Willem Dafoe’s comedic relief was necessary. I also couldn’t stop focusing on how bad his wig was.

Am told that the soundtrack, by Robin Carolan, is excellent. Bill Skarsdard is totally unrecognizeable as Nosferatu. His character’s surprising and ample mustache could not get me stop thinking of how much he looked like Karel Roden as Rasputin in Hellboy (2004)

Might be the only one here…

This is an illustration for a poem. Here’s an explanation via a Reddit comment for I tried to read the entire thing but lost enthusiasm.

The Devil has come to punish a farmer who tricked him. The farmer hides in a big vat of holy water, his wife comes out sobbing about how violent and fearsome her husband is. She warns the devil:

For God’s sake try, my lord, to get away
Just now I heard the savage fellow say
He’d with his claws your lordship tear and slash
See, only, my lord, he made this gash;
On which she showed:— what you will guess, no doubt
And put the demon presently to rout
Who crosses himself and trembled with a fright
He’d never seen nor heard of such a sight,
Where scratch from claws or nails do appeared;

So the joke is the devil has never seen a vagina before, assumes the wife has been castrated, and that the farmer will castrate him too. Also the implication is the wife has a gigantic vagina. Its a stupid bawdy joke, from a century full of stupid bawdy jokes (also funnier in the prose original in Rabelais’ Gargantuan and Pantagruel — this is a later versification).

Perhaps a bit embarrassing since I’ve read the book so many times¹, but I had no idea that The Count of Monte Cristo was based on a real life story, thanks to this video.

The cringe I get from the explanation from someone who truly knows the game is akin to the one I get from “hacking the mainframe” or “tracking the killer’s IP address” or the casual “bypassing the firewall”.

All hat, no cattle indeed. I can venture a guess at the answer but: Why, why is any of this poorly executed, ultra-cringey enhancement to your popular and established mystique even necessary?

Pretty sure Elon could isolate the node and dump them on the other side of the router. Via CM. Come to think of it, he might just do “a total rewrite of the whole thing” with “really high velocity”. He can do anything, this guy.

I finally switched over from Chrome to Firefox, after switching away from the latter over 12 years ago. I’d basically given up on any shred of privacy I might have left on the internet, but the final straw for me was Chrome totally bypassing the DNS blocklists on my PiHole¹ (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Unsurprising, really. You’re encouraged to read this comic (PDF) on the company’s intentionally odious practices².

The usual argument is “why’re you complaining about something that’s free?” Because I deem privacy to be a fundamental right that is to be respected even if you’re giving shit away. We can gripe about its fundamentalness but can perhaps agree that “Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for — in plain English, and repeatedly.” There’s nothing clear about this with Chrome. It’s not hard to quit doing sneaky and evil things without peoples’ informed consent.

The Good #

Transferring bookmarks (of which I have very few) and history was a breeze.

Most extensions I’ve depended upon in Chrome are available for Firefox. There appear to be ways to get Chrome extensions to work in Firefox but I haven’t needed them. Pure nostalgia: I was reminded of the Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick which I starting using in 2004 (I think) to live-edit with CSS (which I thought was just magical, in addition to being a giant time-saver). It’s still around and is still fantastically useful. And available for Chrome as well. lol.

Developer tools, which I need for my job, are mostly the same³ but I found myself preferring the Firefox DevTools a little more for aesthetic/ergonomic/design reasons.

Picture in Picture is excellent.

Preventing YouTube and other websites from autoplaying videos is excellent.

The Okay #

Syncing is P2P, not centralized, and not as elegant and “Just Works™” like with Chrome. But it’s mostly the small things. Like how toolbar layouts are not synced⁴, and how switching the default search provider on your desktop won’t change it on your mobile device. Not a deal-breaker in the least.

On a Mac, the Emoji entry shortcut ( Ctrl+Command+Space) doesn’t work. For the amount of emojis I use in my personal communications, this is far more annoying than the syncing issues.

AirPlay doesn’t work. Never worked on Chrome either. So whatever. Use Safari.

The Bad #

None. It’s a fantastic browser.

Other Stuff #

So why not Safari? Extensions. That’s really it. It’s a very limited ecosystem and some things I really need aren’t available for Safari. I suppose I could use two different browsers for work and play but I’m not there yet.

While I do use a PiHole, I’d recommend Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin⁵ to people switching away. Maybe even add NoScript to the mix. I believe Facebook Container is installed by default. The adversarial/defensive relationship we have with the internet feels bit sad to me as a 90s kid who still remembers its magic and promise but that’s how it is.

You can see where Firefox stores your profile via Help → More Troubleshooting Information → Profile Folder

I’ve configured all installations on my laptops and phone to use DuckDuckGo as the default search engine.

“Hello, We’re Firefox, The Only Browser That Hasn’t Hit Itself In The Dick With A Hammer. For years now, folks use us because of our un-hammered dick. Now, you may be wondering why today we’ve brought this hammer and pulled out our dick. Well I’m glad you asked-”

@TheZeldaZone

Now the CEO claims that there will be an AI “kill-switch” but I do not see why this is unnecessary garbage is on by default (thinking of my parents here).

1. Majnuna by HUGEL
   
2. Wow by Giulio Cercato
   
3. Habibty by Hassan Shakosh Ft Yasmin Raeis
   

   This and Mesaytara are my two new favorite earworms right now.

4. Mesaytara by Lamis Kan
   

1. Category Theory Illustrated
   

Let’s celebrate the not-so-great and “Wish it had gone better!” Embrace the mediocre family times you share together.

The book has a few notes towards the end. Love a good reminder that Nature is rather hardcore. Two things I thought of as I read short descriptions of why the featured animals do what they do are (1) a minimization of energy/waste and (2) good 'ol natural selection: they just want to make sure they continue to make more of themselves.

Cuckoos are still terrible and I might dislike them more than Canadian Geese, the bros of the bird world. But all this aside, it’s a fact that there is no more worse mom or parent than this nightmare of a human being:

*shudder*

Features two late legends, Sanjeev Kumar (Santa) and Kishore Kumar (singer). Not sure who advised the former to strike a “BRO WHAT’S EVEN GOING ON” expression throughout the song.

Wondered what became of the kids in the video. Assuming they were ~10 at the time this movie was released in 1974 they’d be in their 60s now. Time, yo.

Best I’ve seen in recent memory.

Features the poem “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling, read with this bone-chilling pitch and cadence by a chap named Taylor Holmes in 1915. Here’s the track by itself. Sounds like it was taken from a record; the noise doesn’t help with the chilling of the bones.

The last few minutes remind me of this song.

Not sure what else to add here, other than my head reeling with “How the heck does one even think up this subject?”. And appreciating how the Internet can be such an amazing forum for collective weirdness and joy.

Speaking of fora, the link’s on Twitter so here’s a cached version to save you the discomfiture of engaging with it.

1. Bar Breaker by PROF
   
2. American Boy by Estelle (feat. Kanye West)
   
3. Monkey Drums (Copenhagen Jazz Festival Bootleg) by Lulu Rouge feat. Nina Simone
   

Not completely unsurprising, but yeah: I was struck by how it’s essentially a continuous tone after about 2,000 BPM. Makes one wonder if anything in the Universe is really continuous or if all of it is fundamentally discrete. Also makes you wonder how animals like bees perceive the world.

The Beekeeper is next, for days when I say “fuck it” and toss a frozen pizza into the oven after work ✨🍕✨